old favorites: roseanne

Last night, with nothing on the tivo that we both hadn't seen, my boyfriend and I sat down to watch two episodes of Roseanne. Roseanne was one of my favorite shows growing up, and it's one of the few that I remember watching each week (Wednesdays at 9, if I recall correctly) in my parents' bedroom (the place to watch tv uninterrupted, with my sister already asleep in our shared room, my dad working nights, and my mom watching the day's soaps in the living room) while eating microwave popcorn (my favorite snack in those days) and laughing hysterically. Even at that young age (the show premiered when I was 7), I knew that there weren't many families like mine on tv--families where money was always an issue, where people yelled and were sarcastic and things didn't always turn out okay.

But a lot has been said about the less-than-perfect lives of the Conners, including by me in a paper I wrote for my Women and Television class in college about the conflict between Roseanne and her uppity neighbor Kathy Bowman in season four. But one thing I had forgotten about the show is that things often ended on a very, very down note. This was evident last night in the two episodes we watched from season seven--White Men Can't Kiss and Maybe Baby, about racism and abortion. (They skipped the Thanksgiving episode in between the two, probably because Nana Mary talks about her actual abortions in that one.) Maybe that's also part of what kept me tuning in week after week--I wanted to know if things would be okay for the Conners.

But don't get me started on the last episode of Roseanne, one of the worst last episodes EVER.